IP Address and Vista

I don't know about the rest of you guys and gals, but I really hate it when I'm surfing the Internet and I run across an Ad that comes up and references my location because my IP Address is easily viewed by companies and people who don't care about invading my privacy for their own selfish advertisements that are of no interest to me anyway.

Is there anything I can do about this?

I tried an application to hide my IP address a while back, but found that it slowed down my connection too much, and as such I just removed it and haven't bothered to deal with this situation since then, but I'm really fed up and disgusted by these kinds of ads and am just wondering what the best approach would be to try and address it once and for all.

Thanks.

Have you ever checked into a proxy server?

I use a proxy for when I need to get around my security settings and don't feel like changing them. It'll hide your IP from ads, but if this is all you want to do why don't you use firefox and adblock? It does a pretty good job hiding ads, and if you still see them on pages you commonly go to, install the nuke anything enhanced add-on. It'll let you right click and hide anything from flash and image adds, to individual tables as well.

OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster Internet

this might work.

whs said:

Have you ever checked into a proxy server?

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Other than AOL, when I'm actually signed on to their Service, which isn't that often, No, I haven't.

truthkid said:

I use a proxy for when I need to get around my security settings and don't feel like changing them. It'll hide your IP from ads, but if this is all you want to do why don't you use firefox and adblock? It does a pretty good job hiding ads, and if you still see them on pages you commonly go to, install the nuke anything enhanced add-on. It'll let you right click and hide anything from flash and image adds, to individual tables as well.

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Most of the time I use IE. I used Firefox also, but just recently uninstalled it for totally unrelated reasons, but it's not just the Ads, because they also serve as a reminder as to how easily a person can be monitored when simply minding their own business, and I don't like it.

I do have a Pop-Up blocker, which I'd imagine most people have these days, but the ads also appear right on Pages you may be visiting as you apparently know.

Nuke anything you say? I've never heard of that App, but will look into it also. Not sure I want to go back to using Firefox though.

Thanks.

kword88 said:

OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster Internet
this might work.

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Thanks --I'll check this out also.

ccantare said:

truthkid said:

I use a proxy for when I need to get around my security settings and don't feel like changing them. It'll hide your IP from ads, but if this is all you want to do why don't you use firefox and adblock? It does a pretty good job hiding ads, and if you still see them on pages you commonly go to, install the nuke anything enhanced add-on. It'll let you right click and hide anything from flash and image adds, to individual tables as well.

Click to expand...

Most of the time I use IE. I used Firefox also, but just recently uninstalled it for totally unrelated reasons, but it's not just the Ads, because they also serve as a reminder as to how easily a person can be monitored when simply minding their own business, and I don't like it.

I do have a Pop-Up blocker, which I'd imagine most people have these days, but the ads also appear right on Pages you may be visiting as you apparently know.

Nuke anything you say? I've never heard of that App, but will look into it also. Not sure I want to go back to using Firefox though.

Thanks.

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You're not being monitored, anytime you access a site it has to know the IP address of where it's going, the ads are just smart enough to check the octets on the IP to figure out where your internet provider is. For instance, when I was running a network in Korea, our actual wan side connection was in chicago so all the single girls ads were offering links to girls "in our area" even though it was a few thousand miles off. Firefox with adblock and nuke anything enhanced is your golden ticket. Why wouldn't you want to use firefox? I can understand using IE if you have an extranet site you need to connect to that's built for IE, but for general web browsing you're a heck of a lot better off with firefox.

truthkid said:

You're not being monitored, anytime you access a site it has to know the IP address of where it's going, the ads are just smart enough to check the octets on the IP to figure out where your internet provider is. For instance, when I was running a network in Korea, our actual wan side connection was in chicago so all the single girls ads were offering links to girls "in our area" even though it was a few thousand miles off.

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That is pretty funny, but in my case, although I'm by no means really secretive about what part of the country I live (I've referenced it many, many times through the years on Message Boards much like this one for instance), the ads always reference the right region and county and it has just always bugged me. I've been putting up with it for a long, long time though, and have been meaning to bring it up here lately and finally decided to do so.

truthkid said:

Firefox with adblock and nuke anything enhanced is your golden ticket. Why wouldn't you want to use firefox? I can understand using IE if you have an extranet site you need to connect to that's built for IE, but for general web browsing you're a heck of a lot better off with firefox.

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Why? I just don't find it to be that sophisticated, especially compared to IE, and I had been considering uninstalling it for a while, but the last straw was when someone brought the ".NET Framework Assistant 1.0" installation to my attention and I couldn't get rid of it. You may well know about this issue by now, but it was being installed via a Windows Service pack without asking or advising users about its installation first, and the Uninstall feature once it was installed was greyed out ...I toyed with it a little, saw it was going to be more of a headache to get rid of it than I cared to be bothered with, so that was the last straw for Firefox as far as I was concerned at that point, and I just removed it from my computer altogether finally, which was even easier once I had also realized that I liked Safari more for those needs that I relied on Firefox for (an e-mail account and watching video online, and that was it).

What am I missing about Firefox that perhaps I should know?

IE has private browsing (pr0n mode) which doesn't record history/cookies for that session, while Firefox does that and allows you to pick sites where it never remembers the history/cookies. Firefox has tear away tabs, so you can drag any tab off the current window and create a new window from it. Firefox saves form info in case you close the window by accident, which could come in very handy when typing a long response in a forum (just tossing an idea out there). Firefox also has a new javascript engine that is faster then the previous one.

Oh and don't forget the add-ons (Ad-block, No Script, Nuke Anything Enhanced, Lazarus, Greasemonkey, Stumbleupon just to name a few) to Firefox. Not sure what qualifies as "sophisticated" to you, I never saw someone pull that rabbit out of the hat. I'm stuck using IE at work, it's never run on my home computer, and I don't miss it. I access all my DoD sites no problem with Firefox. My thinking is this, if the browser is one of the main programs you use on the computer, would you rather it be completely developed and controled by a single company, or a community? IE is all you, you can have my share of it as well. I'd much rather surf the internet, which is nothing but a community sharing data, using a browser made by a community sharing data.

truthkid said:

IE has private browsing (pr0n mode) which doesn't record history/cookies for that session, while Firefox does that and allows you to pick sites where it never remembers the history/cookies.

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How come IE doesn't offer the same options?

truthkid said:

Firefox has tear away tabs, so you can drag any tab off the current window and create a new window from it.

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This strikes me as of somewhat limited value and advantage, but perhaps that's because it's not essential to my own personal needs generally speaking.

truthkid said:

Firefox saves form info in case you close the window by accident, which could come in very handy when typing a long response in a forum (just tossing an idea out there).

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Okay, here you certainly have my attention because I have lost long messages that I had intended to post through the years, no question --it happened to me a week or so ago in fact and made me absolutely furious because it wasn't even my fault; an app stopped responding, so I attempted to close the app and it shut down the Page I was on altogether, and I lost a very lengthy post that I subsequently had to write over from scratch --and any time that happens to me, which is once in a while, every so often, it makes me so damn angry I could spit nails.

truthkid said:

Firefox also has a new javascript engine that is faster then the previous one. Oh and don't forget the add-ons (Ad-block, No Script, Nuke Anything Enhanced, Lazarus, Greasemonkey, Stumbleupon just to name a few) to Firefox.

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I was unaware of all the Add-Ons, but for what I used Firefox for, which was rather limited, it's no surprise that I wasn't aware of them until now.

truthkid said:

Not sure what qualifies as "sophisticated" to you,

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One of the things I couldn't stand about it was that Rich Text wasn't available to me when dealing with e-mail or message boards like this one, and I didn't like the idea of having to jump through hoops in order to get it operating with that browser. Do they still depend on Midas for that? I really don't know to tell you the truth, but if so, how come the darn thing isn't default set to On?

It also had a plain, unsophisticated, unpolished look to me --other browsers, such as Safari, or Opera, which I haven't used as yet, but I've seen Screen Shots of, don't appear anywhere near as dingy to me by comparison. Granted, that sounds like a mainly aesthetic observation and concern on my part, but people do judge a book by its cover, so to speak. Don't get me wrong though --it did have its uses, but I preferred the look and feel of IE instead.

truthkid said:

I never saw someone pull that rabbit out of the hat. I'm stuck using IE at work, it's never run on my home computer, and I don't miss it. I access all my DoD sites no problem with Firefox. My thinking is this, if the browser is one of the main programs you use on the computer, would you rather it be completely developed and controled by a single company, or a community?

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I think it depends on the company you're looking at --I know people have had their quips about IE through the years, and that it's been susceptible to hacks and attacks, but on the other hand, Microsoft has also been a pioneering industry leader for the last couple of decades.

truthkid said:

IE is all you, you can have my share of it as well. I'd much rather surf the internet, which is nothing but a community sharing data, using a browser made by a community sharing data.

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Perhaps, but I'd imagine that also has its own inherent shortfalls too. Less support perhaps? Slower response times if a special patch and/or essential update of some type needs to be developed, for instance?